What Should the Taoiseach Say to the Pope?

By Enda Kenny
New Statesman
September 22, 2012

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/09/what-should-taoiseach-say-pope

Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. Credit: Getty Images

Ireland's very own bronze-haired, twinkly-eyed Taoiseach Enda Kenny is today meeting Pope Benedict XVI in Rome. As to what should be on his lips is anyone's guess. One hopes that he is mindful of our history, and that his smile does not take precedence over the articulation of anger felt by our - although economically burdened - still optimistic people and that he makes the Catholic Church acknowledge the irrevocable damage inflicted by them and their institution head-on, face to face.

"A society of albanised peasants," was the damning depiction of 1960s Ireland declared by the late writer, Sean O'Faolain. Run, as he said we were then, by a completely obscurantist, repressive, regressive and uncultivated church, it was theocracy that managed the holy land of Ireland. And it was here, as in other places, that politics and religion have had an incestuous relationship. Ireland is a wicked example of what can go wrong.

While most of the west in the 19th century was industrialised and urbanised, Ireland remained an impoverished Catholic society, shackled with arrested development, where the men of the holy cloth had the last word not only in sermon, but on all sorts of policy, public and social. The Catholic Church was the alpha and the omega. There was deep attachment to land and faith, tradition and ritual. The modernisation of Ireland, however, inevitably would be in opposition to religion. Television, the sexual revolution and globalisation, all contributed fiercely. It was the sex scandals, though, that would be the killer element in the implosion of the church.

The church made expensive effort to hide the rape and torture of children from the relevent authorities, even forcing child victims to put their names to secrecy oaths that prevented them from testifying. A cocktail of fear and naivete enabled the silence to endure. Starting in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government inquiries established that hundreds of holy men had acted in the most unholy fashion. In many cases, these men were shifted to other parishes to avoid embarrassment and scandal, assisted by those at a more senior level - an institutional conspiracy.

Kenny's host, Pope Benedict XVI or Joseph Ratzinger as he was, is closely associated with this obstruction of justice. When promoted to cardinal, he was singularly responsible for the direction of "the congregation for the doctrine of the faith". In 2001, Pope John Paul II assigned Ratzinger's department to manage the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. Ratzinger promptly penned a letter which he sent swiftly to every bishop, in which he promoted secrecy around inquiries into sexual misconduct.

Enda Kenny was accurate last year when he said that there was dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism dominating the culture of the Vatican to this day, and that the rape and torture of Irish children was downplayed or managed to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation. All is now under question as its irrelevance gains momentum. A reiteration of this personally to Pope Benedict would be diligent.

He should also address the position of Cardinal Sean Brady, disgraced leader of the Irish Catholic Church, and his information about Father Brendan Smyth. Kenny should demand answers and justice on behalf of the victims who are of his electorate, whom he represents. This is an opportunity for him to gain some public clout, but, also too, an opportunity to show he has some steel behind his words. We can only hope that he acts diligently and addresses these issues, instead of aquiescing to this negligent institution.